- Link:
- http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/91528
- Collection:
-
- Subjects
- apartheid company town South Africa oil-from-coal SASOL modernity African Studies History (General) Urban Planning Social Sciences
- Creator:
- Sparks, Stephen John
- Contributors:
- Hecht, Gabrielle Glover, William J. Cohen, David W. Ashforth, Adam Philip
- Description
- This dissertation explores the relationships
between apartheid and modernism, arguing that the South African
apartheid state’s oil-from-coal project, SASOL, and the company
town Sasolburg were key sites for the elaboration of the ‘apartheid
modern’, the particular form which industrial modernity took under
apartheid. Moving across a number of domains, the dissertation
shows how nationalist discourses celebrated SASOL’s technological
prowess and the ‘pioneering’ toil of South African scientists, but
the viability of oil-from-coal depended on the cheap cost of black
labor in the early apartheid period. SASOL’s managers and
Sasolburg’s burghers envisioned the project transforming rural
Afrikaners into respectable industrial citizens. The architect
employed by SASOL to design Sasolburg, Max Kirchhofer, valorized
congeniality in residential neighborhoods and leisure as antidotes
to the alienating aspects of industrial modernity. Kirchhofer’s
belief that ‘lower-income’ whites in Sasolburg could be reformed by
good planning dissipated because of their reluctance to make
themselves in the image of a culture linking respectability with
particular aesthetic practices. African women’s domestic labor was
critical to the making of respectable white families, but the black
subculture which emerged around these women in Sasolburg made this
dependence subversive of white respectability. The intensity of a
co-produced ‘paternalistic’ culture in the SASOL compound in nearby
Zamdela township until the mid-1960s saw the compound manager
facilitating migrants’ attempts at encapsulating themselves from
the corruptions of industrial modernity. Zamdela’s aspirant middle
class similarly enrolled white officials in their attempts at
constituting a respectable local community. Increasingly pervasive
capitalist commodity culture, the emergence of assertive forms of
black politics and workforce ‘South Africanization’ in the 1970s
undermined ‘paternalism’ at SASOL. The company belatedly extended
home-ownership schemes to Africans, but in the 1980s, in the
context of unprecedented labor militancy it renounced
‘paternalism’, undertook retrenchments and subcontracting
increased. With the end of apartheid both ‘paternalism’ and the
jobs which defined this company town and the ‘apartheid modern’,
have disappeared. In the apparent ruins of the ‘apartheid modern’,
young African residents of Zamdela are demanding for their township
the civic infrastructure which the ‘apartheid modern’ produced in
Sasolburg.
- Language
- en_US
- Access:
- Instructions in case access is denied
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